Pellucidar | Page 5

it was a French military instrument was my first guess; but really there didn't seem
much likelihood that this was the correct explanation, when one took into account the
loneliness and remoteness of the spot.
As I sat gazing at my remarkable find, which was tick-ing and clicking away there in the
silence of the desert night, trying to convey some message which I was unable to interpret,
my eyes fell upon a bit of paper lying in the bottom of the box beside the instrument. I
picked it up and examined it. Upon it were written but two letters:
D. I.
They meant nothing to me then. I was baffled.
Once, in an interval of silence upon the part of the receiving instrument, I moved the
sending-key up and down a few times. Instantly the receiving mechanism commenced to
work frantically.
I tried to recall something of the Morse Code, with which I had played as a little boy--but
time had obliterated it from my memory. I became almost frantic as I let my imagination
run riot among the possibilities for which this clicking instrument might stand.
Some poor devil at the unknown other end might be in dire need of succor. The very
franticness of the instrument's wild clashing betokened something of the kind.
And there sat I, powerless to interpret, and so power-less to help!
It was then that the inspiration came to me. In a flash there leaped to my mind the closing
paragraphs of the story I had read in the club at Algiers:
Does the answer lie somewhere upon the bosom of the broad Sahara, at the ends of two
tiny wires, hidden beneath a lost cairn?
The idea seemed preposterous. Experience and in-telligence combined to assure me that
there could be no slightest grain of truth or possibility in your wild tale--it was fiction
pure and simple.
And yet where WERE the other ends of those wires?
What was this instrument--ticking away here in the great Sahara--but a travesty upon the
possible!
Would I have believed in it had I not seen it with my own eyes?
And the initials--D. I.--upon the slip of paper!
David's initials were these--David Innes.
I smiled at my imaginings. I ridiculed the assumption that there was an inner world and
that these wires led downward through the earth's crust to the surface of Pellucidar. And

yet--
Well, I sat there all night, listening to that tantalizing clicking, now and then moving the
sending-key just to let the other end know that the instrument had been discovered. In the
morning, after carefully returning the box to its hole and covering it over with sand, I
called my servants about me, snatched a hurried breakfast, mounted my horse, and started
upon a forced march for Algiers.
I arrived here today. In writing you this letter I feel that I am making a fool of myself.
There is no David Innes.
There is no Dian the Beautiful.
There is no world within a world.
Pellucidar is but a realm of your imagination--noth-ing more.
BUT--
The incident of the finding of that buried telegraph instrument upon the lonely Sahara is
little short of uncanny, in view of your story of the adventures of David Innes.
I have called it one of the most remarkable coinci-dences in modern fiction. I called it
literature before, but--again pardon my candor--your story is not.
And now--why am I writing you?
Heaven knows, unless it is that the persistent clicking of that unfathomable enigma out
there in the vast silences of the Sahara has so wrought upon my nerves that reason refuses
longer to function sanely.
I cannot hear it now, yet I know that far away to the south, all alone beneath the sands, it
is still pounding out its vain, frantic appeal.
It is maddening
It is your fault--I want you to release me from it.
Cable me at once, at my expense, that there was no basis of fact for your story, At the
Earth's Core.
Very respectfully yours,
COGDON NESTOR,
--and--Club,
Algiers.

June 1st,--.

Ten minutes after reading this letter I had cabled Mr. Nestor as follows:
Story true. Await me Algiers.
As fast as train and boat would carry me, I sped toward my destination. For all those
dragging days my mind was a whirl of mad conjecture, of frantic hope, of numbing fear.
The finding of the telegraph-instrument practically assured me that David Innes had
driven Perry's iron mole back through the earth's crust to the buried world of Pellucidar;
but what adventures had befallen him since his return?
Had he found Dian the Beautiful, his half-savage mate, safe among his friends, or had
Hooja the Sly One succeeded in his nefarious schemes to abduct her?
Did Abner Perry, the lovable